


Surrogate Mothers

by urbanMystic



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human/Troll Society, Alternate Universe - No Sburb/Sgrub Sessions, Decay, F/F, Jesus Mention, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-30
Updated: 2015-03-30
Packaged: 2018-03-20 08:08:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3642951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/urbanMystic/pseuds/urbanMystic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Doc Scratch owns a hotel where politically important Humans and Trolls spend their summers. He gets power hungry and summons an elder god. Rose and Feferi go to the source of the problem, and wind up saving the day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Surrogate Mothers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [violets101](https://archiveofourown.org/users/violets101/gifts).



According to legend, Aleister Crowley had a long and successful life as an occult magician, communing with many demons and angels beyond name. There was only one demon who ever escaped his immaculate circles and rite: Time. In that desert, rumor says, you can still catch glimpses of the day which left Crowley's partner driven to madness and possession. Somewhere in between a mirage and a skipping VHS, you can still find the doomed lines in the sand.

\---

Towering above two small girls was a mass of tentacles and compost. The oily mess was working its way into the once pristine grout of the pool in a way that would never come out, a permanent reminder of the events of the evening. As the decaying pile writhed and bubbled, Rose felt the being's true presence: a mental intrusion of fear and anger, one she couldn't calm with her breath or her will. She froze, grimoire in hand, humming at her side in odd discord with her own whimpers. It was barely audible over the wind that whipped over her ears.

Feferi stood at her side, the young troll splattered with the sour odor and grit of the tentacled heap. She was also feeling the effects, the rage and loneliness threatening to overwhelm her. Her eyes were trained on the shell of a man who had dared call such a god from its slumber, a vicious hotel owner with pretensions of greatness. His superfluously expensive white suit remained, but his mind was gone. The circle to summon the beast was burning its way into his skin, leaving purple and white all over his pale pink face like the very first Easter stigmata opening to let the pulp out of the savior's hands and onto the poor asshole's face. The troll focused her rage on him, let her eyes lose their healthy yellow and grow into unnatural white.

"Rose," she heaved, her voice too high for the weight she felt, "Don't fight her."

"Her?" Rose grasped the book to her chest.

"Yeah, just," Feferi pulled a sharp breath through her shark teeth, "Feel it."

Scratch's face writhed with pain, his body tightening on itself. Rose's started to follow suit, trying to remember the page in the manuscript for this particular deity. Her mind raced through so many answers, but even if she had remembered the name, how could she have pronounced it with a mortal tongue?

Tentacles slithered in a pack down a back hallway, starting to spill out of the dimly lit pool and into the locker rooms, looking for more fear to eat. Feferi's body started to relax, to warm, and her grey skin began to show raised pattern of scar tissue where no cuts had ever pierced it. How could the wind be screaming?

It had all started with summer holiday.

\---

The hotel sat in a lonely corner of the New York finger lakes. The rich and famous were gathering form human and troll nations alike to hobnob and network and to show off their rotting lives: sham marriages between power hungry diplomats, children who had never known innocence, children who knew an innocence that made them cruel, or the few quiet souls who wished to simply slither off into self destruction in peace.

Feferi Peixes, heiress to the empress's throne, was hard to pin down at first. Rose saw her playing in the indoor swimming pool and beachfront often, smiling and making nice with the other children. Rose herself was often in the shade trying to read. Her goal for the summer had been to finish the large grimoire her mother had purchased as an apology for one of her weekend binges. It reeked of guilt and neglect, but Rose loved it anyway and poured over page after repetitive page of elder gods. Miss Lalonde Senior was relatively sober this weekend, trying to garner military support for her research. Rose tried to ignore the way her Mom hung off of men's arms and laughed at jokes that were obviously offensive. Her book filled her head with a humming of too much information taken in at once, and it gave her peace.

"What'cha reading?"

The gloomy teen looked up to see the face of one such Feferi Peixes looking down at her. Her response was interrupted quickly with a screech that left her ears ringing.

"OH SHIT"

"I'm right here, Miss Peixes."

"Nonono I've seen this!"

"The Abstract Key of Solomon?"

"No, this thing" She pointed to a tentacled trash heap on the page, "I have dreams about her all the time!"

"Interesting."

Hours passed from that one conversation, migrating to the dining hall and then into the room Rose had separate from her mother, who was entertaining guests. Perhaps it was their similar chubby statures. Perhaps it was Feferi's natural way of making conversation, or Rose's witty if brusque manner. In any case, they ended up exchanging life stories, from Feferi's dreams of the lusus she had been denied as heiress to Rose's fascination with the western occult schools of magical thought.

Soon enough they were on Rose's bed. Rose sat cross legged with her back against the ornate wooden headboard while Feferi had splayed out, still in her bathing suit.

"I do really like talking to everyone," she was explaining, "and I'm not worried about the ambassador aspect of my future duties, or even the military position. I already know I want to end all these ridiculous wars."

"That's quite a bit to feel confident about," the human replied. Her chin was resting on her palms. 

The seadweller's ear's fluttered, "Well, I have been trained for this position since I escaped the brooding caverns on homeworld, but I have no idea how I'm going to handle making decisions where I have to sacrifice one groups needs for another's. It happens in budget committees all the time."

"Does the Empress act like your mother at all? You could ask her how she does it."

"Ugh. The Empress doesn't care about anything but herself! It makes me so mad! I don't even get to see the lusus that was supposed to raise me because Her Imperial Selfishness doesn't want to lose another one of her trump cards." Feferi was almost crying, her voice squeaking more than usual.

Rose panicked. In an unusually small tone, she replied, "I know what its like to have a mother who's selfish, if you could even call her my mother." Even the cheerful summer breeze seemed to still, and the room felt huge.

"But your Mom seems so nice," the troll replied. She knew full well that appearances could be deceiving, but it was all she could think to say.

"She's pleasant," Rose continued, "but she never wants to be with me. She'd rather get two separate rooms so she can talk to rich generals and drink than spend time."

Feferi wiped her eyes. "When I have the dreams of the monster I showed you, that's my lusus, my mother. Well, that's what she says anyway."

"I believe you."

"If I ever meet her, do you want me to ask her to be your mother too?"

"Sure. It would probably suit me better that my current one."

They had a sad giggle, and then Feferi reached for Rose's hand.

"Hey. I mean it."

Rose blushed and looked away.

\---

"Rose! Don't fight her!"

Rose looked up at her friend, the girl who had shared so much, w over the last few weeks, who had held her without question, and listened. She stopped fighting and let the feeling overwhelm her, purposefully looked at the images of her mother in strange men's bed, dying of liver failure, of forgetting to say "I love you". Her skin went from a saturated brown to a dark grey, and her eyes went pale white like Feferi's. The air itself celebrated and revolted in turn, flinging straw bits of the elder god onto the walls.

Her tongue spoke true, her being knew suddenly the name of the goddess before her, and she spoke it. To Scratch, who was still in that tortured body somewhere, it sounded like a wolf's howl scratching a chalkboard. To Feferi, it sounded like her mother's name, the one she had never been able to meet, the one who could be bigger than the responsibility that haunted her, that could love her no matter how flawed she had become. Even if Feferi was so flawed as to crack, this was the being who held her dear. She could have cried of relief to hear it spoken, but the ambivalence of her mother's presence was too great to allow something as straightforward as crying.

At the speaking of the name, the beast halted. The wind stopped. Rose and Feferi felt the goddess turn her attention to them, or rather a fraction of it, and two pairs of tentacles slid out of the pool to wrap around the girls. 

**"Thank you for Knowing me, my daughters."**

\---

"Rose!" Feferi leapt over and hugged the short goth, "How was your year?"

Rose giggled, "You ask me that as though we haven't been emailing this whole time."

"Yeah so?!?" the heiress smiled, "I wanna hear you tell me again!"

Rose hugged back, "Only if you tell me how you've been also. Are you in the penthouse again?"

"Yeah," Feferi let go and took a half step back, "Let's put your stuff away and I'll show you!"

"Yes, remove me from this sunlight before I go up in flames."

Feferi dragged Rose along by the hand, "I bet you'll be a lot less cranky after we make out a little."

The human blushed scarlet, "I can neither confirm nor deny these allegations."


End file.
